The rapid growth of artificial intelligence bots on the internet will see them outnumber humans online by 2027, according to the head of internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare.
Speaking at the SXSW conference this week, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince noted that the popularity of AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini had resulted in a massive change in web traffic over the last six months.
“Who, or what, is browsing the internet is changing incredibly rapidly,” Mr Prince said.
“For a long time, the internet was about 20 per cent bot traffic. Google was the largest, but you had a whole bunch of other things including hackers and spammers and all kinds of miscreants that were online.
“With the rise of generative AI, it’s just an insatiable need for data. We’re seeing a rise where we suspect that in 2027 the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that’s online – and it will continue to grow after that.”
The tech boss warned that the speed at which AI traffic is increasing could lead to significant strain on the web, especially with the rise of agentic AI, where bots perform actions autonomously on behalf of a user.
Mr Prince said that AI bots will typically go to a thousand times more sites than an actual human would visit when performing a task online, such as shopping for a digital camera or planning a vacation.
This huge level of web traffic is putting a significant strain on servers, security providers and other underlying infrastructure of the web.
“We’re all going to have to invent new technologies to support what is being delivered,” Mr Prince said.
“We’re seeing internet traffic grow and grow and grow. And we don’t see anything that’s going to slow it down or stop it.”
A report last year from cyber security firm Imperva revealed that automated traffic already accounts for more than half of all web activity, with so-called “bad bots” at their highest-ever recorded level.
These bots are being used by cyber criminals to carry out spamming campaigns, or even distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that knock websites offline by overloading them with traffic.
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